Installing wordpress was a breeze. In fact installing wordpress was so easy I was just awestruck by it’s simplicity. WordPress ROCKS!
Installing themes was also relatively straightforward. Some themes worked seamlessly, others took some tweaking but overall with a little html/css knowledge you’ll get the hang of it. However I had to install some custom widgets to make my site look a bit more presentable.
I installed ‘Social Media Widget’ and that gave me that little side bar with a section that allowed you to view my linkedIN, facebook , Twitter and email address. This little tool worked like a charm, although I needed up upload my widgets via FTP rather than direct download from the wordpress server to work.
Then I installed AddToAny which has this little ‘Share This’ link at the bottom of every post on the main index page. ‘Share this’ is right next to Comments and allows my readers to share the content directly from the index page without having to view the full blog post. Contents can be shared to almost 100+ social media websites, some of which I never knew existed.
Finally I installed DiggDigg and that gave two things, the facebook like button at the top of every post (and that’s for the post page only and not the home page of the blog), as well as the LinkedIn share button, the facebook share button and the twitter button at the bottom of every post (once again for the individual post page and not the full index page).
So in total I had to install 3 different plugins:
1) Social media widget -> on the sidebar for visitors to talk to me directly via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Email
2) AddToAny -> at the bottom of the post info on the MAIN HOME PAGE
3) DiggDigg -> for the facebook like and share buttons on the bottom of every post on the INDIVIDUAL home pages.
So now readers can contact me via social media and share my content via social media too. This was so far the hardest thing to do. I had to split it into so many widgets because one widget by itself wasn’t working too well.
AddToAny takes me to their site, which I didn’t like, plus it had waaaay too many options to be simple. DiggDigg works very well, but I needed to have the manual install which involved taking php code snippets and pasting them in my themes php files. This means I’ll have to repeat this when I change my theme. At the bottom of the post page, linkedIn, Facebook and Twitter looked slightly out of alignment, especially twitter I’m trying to fix this but I’m not losing any sleep over it. It looks cheesy and unprofessional, but it’s taking way too much time to figure this out. I will come back it though.
I also tweaked the theme a bit. You’ll notice that the bottom footer no longer has a login link, no point since I’m the only one accessing the blog. Also I’ve change the excerpt mode, and what that means is that the main index page (which is the page you see on www.keithrozario.com), will only display an excerpt of the post rather than the full text and that makes the page look a lot neater. That being said, the current theme looks a bit too funky for me and I’m looking to change it.
Next up, I’m hoping to install a second wordpress with a different theme and link it here. That way I can use a different theme on the second wordpress and have it flow seamlessly from my blog here.
Stay tuned.